


Get Out of Here

by TheVineSpeaketh



Category: Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Original Work
Genre: Death, For my friend's birthday, Gen, Original Character(s), Post-Apocalypse, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-12
Updated: 2013-07-12
Packaged: 2017-12-19 07:17:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/880977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheVineSpeaketh/pseuds/TheVineSpeaketh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With things turning out the way they were, they were surprised they were actually scraping by so well. Well, without any mental breakdowns, anyhow. It's not like they need to talk about things, right? Zar, Alucard and Razzle have never been good about talking about their feelings anyway. And Isa? Well, she never really talked at all.</p><p>For my best friend's birthday, which is today. Happy birthday, bro!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Get Out of Here

**Author's Note:**

> For my best friend's birthday. Sorry about butchering your characters! At least I know I got mine right. :D
> 
> Enjoy.

In high school, Zar was taught to roll with the punches. All those guidance counselors sat him down and told him in no way was it okay to smash someone's nose in if they call you a fag, even if you  **were** fighting because the word 'fag' shouldn't be used as a derogatory term, which was  _exactly what he was doing_. He'd told Isa about that on one of those long, eventless nights, and she'd said, "Yeah, I'm fairly certain 'fag' is a slang term for a cigarette."

But that wasn't the point here. The point was, those guidance counselors were  **wrong,** and the principal was wrong, too. You weren't supposed to just politely ask somebody to leave you be or stop saying something offensive to you. You were supposed to scare the ever-loving shit out of them with your fists or maybe even a thorough chewing out complete with intimidating glares, because that's how you stayed on top and out of trouble. It was because Jimmy Kennedy had called him a 'fag' and he'd decked him in the schnoz that he was where he was today. Surviving. You don't get muscles from saying 'please.'

 _However, you do get them from steroids_ , Zar thought, swinging a glance over to Razzle as his hands reloaded his automatic. Razzle was just standing there, a giant heaping pile of muscle and heavy breathing that even outdid Zar's hulking frame, gripping onto his fire axe and glaring his way into the forest around them. He was one of those guys who never really outgrew the teenager mentality of 'I can do anything I want and not get hurt', and it really showed in his fighting style. It's not every day you see a huge-ass Tank run at somebody and all they do is raise their axe and attempt to clobber them with it. Zar thought he was a dumbass, but nothing about that was new. He attributed it to the steroids everyone assumed he'd taken.

Next to him, looking slightly more composed, was Alucard, who probably got where he was from not taking shit from anybody in a different fashion. Instead of physical intimidation, it was probably more along the lines of what he could persuade others to do to his enemies than what he himself would actually dirty his own hands with. Nevertheless, he was a freaky guy. It didn't help that he kind of looked like an albino, which (naturally) means you're evil. Nobody's hair is that platinum blonde without hair dye or a defective pigment gene. (He remembered Lucien from the second Fable game had white hair and white skin and that guy was evil as all hell, so naturally he had proof of albinos or at least pale people being malevolent by nature.)

"You okay?" a small voice asked from next to him, and he turned to face Isa, her long black hair pushed away from her face, her spectacled eyes scanning the immediate area. She wisely pointed the shotgun she was wielding down, but she was alert and ready. "You've gone kind of still."

"I'm fine," he replied, adoring her quiet perceptiveness. He straightened his shoulders in an act of 'okay'-ness, and his confidante seemed to be pleased with that. She let him have a small smile before turning her attention to Alucard, who started stalking through the woods, his pistols held in front of him. Razzle hoisted the fire axe on his shoulder and followed, looking leisurely and smug. Isa followed him, her footsteps quiet and seemingly able to avoid every single leaf that graced the ground. Pulling his hoodie closer to beat the autumn chill, Zar pressed on, keeping watch from the back.

They had spent a few hours out here, and the sunset was at the point where flashlights didn't help but it was still too dim to make anything out properly. Zar thought it was just a blessing that it wasn't raining, otherwise the sound of a Witch crying in the corner or even in the middle of the path would have been difficult to hear, and that probably would have ended badly. He stifled a chuckle in his hood as he recalled the first time they'd seen a Witch; needless to say, Razzle had to sit down and get patched up by Alucard, and all the while he just called the dead corpse a cunt and a wuss. He'd learned his lesson, though, and Zar still liked to watch him jump out of his skin when he heard their telltale sob (and it's a shame he could never get Isa to fake one for the sake of hilarity).

Zar's thoughts were broken into when Isa reached back to put a hand on his chest, stopping him from moving. He shook his head clear of thought and looked around, suddenly alert and wondering what they'd stopped for. He could make out nothing in the tall, blackened shapes of the trees, and the world was silent around them.

Then, he heard a small cough. He shifted closer to Isa, pointing his gun in the general direction of the noise. A Smoker, then. He knew how much the damned things loved Isa; she was smaller, easier to grab, because she wasn't as heavy or as large as the others.

A few seconds of silence ticked by, in which the group simply waited, tense and alert. A soft breeze rustled the trees, masking almost every other noise around them with its volume. Zar was aiming out into the woods, damning the crappy visibility of the forest. He glanced over to his teammates, noting the way Razzle's eyes shifted, the eerie calmness of Alucard, and the subtle way Isa's hands were shaking.

And then, a tongue shot out of the woods, reaching for Isa. The shotgun's discharge was loud as the round exploded at it, tearing the tongue asunder before it could even touch her. There was a gurgling screech, and then the injured Smoker limped away through the darkness, no doubt startled by its tongue being cut. Everyone was tense for a few seconds more before Isa chuckled gently, feeding another round into her shotgun and cocking it. "That was lucky," she said, hastily brushing her hair away from her face.

"Yeah," Zar replied, looking at her and smiling with relief. "Lucky."

However, not noticing the Spitter behind them wasn't. With a thick hacking sound, goo hurtled through the air and landed between Razzle and Isa, crackling and popping as it attempted to eat through their clothes and their flesh. Razzle shouted, a bit of his bare arm coated in the stuff. Howling in pain, he moved away from the goo, brushing frantically at his arm, the fire axe forgotten on the forest floor. Infected, attracted to the noise, quickly came swarming around the corner, and Zar turned to face the rear, picking them off from where they were sprinting up the path. Alucard took care of the front, his pistols discharging rapidly as he attempted to thin the herd.

Zar couldn't see what Razzle and Isa were doing, but Razzle's shouts of pain had dimmed to small whimpers, and the sound of a blade hacking into bone meant that he'd once again armed himself. Over the distinct sound of his own gunfire, he could hear the sounds of the pistols, but he never once heard the shotgun fire.

Eventually, the horde thinned to a few stragglers, which were easily dealt with with a few well-placed shots from Alucard’s pistols. Zar whirled around, not expecting to be faced what he could now plainly see. Isa had a water bottle full of murky white liquid in one hand and was splashing it over the raw, bubbling flesh of her arm, tears streaming down her face. The distorted path of eaten flesh reached all the way up to the base of her jaw, red and smelling heavily of burnt skin. Her hair was hissing, large chunks of it burning away, leaving nothing but curled blackened strings in their wake. 

Zar's mouth dropped open, his gun falling limply at his side, still clutched in his hand, albeit loosely. He took two steps toward her, his mind numb as he watched her slightly burning from the goo. He looked up at Razzle, whose arm was also blistering, but the burning had apparently ceased. His arms were moving to Isa, taking the bottle from her hands and pouring it over her head, while Alucard was drawing a knife, holding it to her throat - 

"Whoa, wait a sec," Zar's voice boomed in the silence, and he moved toward them. "What the fuck are you doing?"

The knife slid past her throat, though, and Alucard took her hair in one hand, pulling the knife through it quickly with the other. With a quiet noise akin to a thousand tight threads snapping, the long locks sunk dejectedly to the forest floor as he let them go, leaving Isa with little hair left hanging by her ears. He kept his eyes on his work as he slowly sheared a few stray pieces away, cutting off all the burning strands. "We have to cut the burning hair before it reaches her scalp," he replied testily. A few deft strokes and a brief examination, and Alucard made a small nod, obviously satisfied with his work. Sheathing the knife, Alucard glared at Zar, as if daring him to challenge his knowledge. Then, pulling his pistols from his pockets, he soldiered on, gesturing the group ahead with a deft nod in that direction.

Razzle, Isa and Zar were left in a quiet circle, none of them with any words to say. Razzle slowly handed the bottle back to Isa, who capped it with shaking hands. She brushed both tears and the murky liquid from her eyes, a few strands of missed hair falling into her eyes. Tucking the bottle into her pack, she picked up her shotgun, trying to cock it. From the way she was hissing, it sounded incredibly painful, and Zar moved to help her, but Razzle reached for the gun first, and she gladly relinquished it. He cocked it easily, his hands working it as if they belonged there, before handing it back to her. She gripped it with two hands, pointing it down, as was her way, and for a moment, the two simply stared at each other. Zar was left feeling odd in the silence, wondering what they were saying without words at all, before Isa nodded, and Razzle turned, hoisting the fire axe and walking away. She followed him, slowly and softly as she did before, and Zar, not feeling as if anything was the same as it was before, followed.

* * *

They moved again when the sun rose, and not a moment later. Razzle meticulously helped Isa pack her few spare belongings, a thing that Zar, loathe as he was to admit it, did not enjoy. It was not like Razzle to cater to Isa's needs and to be so attentive to her; when he'd first joined their small group with Alucard, he'd asked why Zar had even bothered bringing her along. Her knowledge combined with Alucard's was enough to put a stopper in those kinds of remarks, but nevertheless, he'd never been overtly kind to her as he was now. It seemed so natural, too; not forced at all, like he would have expected it to. No, as he rolled up her sleeping bag and put it gently in her pack, she boiled some water on the functioning stove in the safe house they'd taken refuge in, and Zar could barely contain his disgust. It was far too...  **domestic** , to the point of which it was uncanny and eerie. He really didn't like it.

Alucard’s lanky frame appeared in the doorway, his eyes wide and alert despite the earliness of the day. “We’re heading out soon,” he said, his voice authoritative despite nobody wanting to comment against his decision. After a brief round of nods and grunts in the affirmative, Alucard ducked out of the room once more. Razzle finished putting together Isa’s pack, standing and moving it over to her. He peered over her shoulder as she crushed something in a pestle (though where she found a pestle was beyond everybody) and dropped it in the hot water, mixing it together by swirling the saucepan. She poured the result in a bottle and set it next to a few others which all seemed to be full of just water. The result of her mixture was the whitened liquid Zar had seen her with the day before.

“So that’s how you make it, huh?” Razzle said, and Isa nodded, turning to Razzle and putting the bottles into her pack before re-zipping it.

“Yep,” she replied demurely, smiling at him slightly. “If you need any more, don’t hesitate to ask.”

“Don’t think I’ll be asking,” he replied, sliding her pack onto her shoulders. Zar didn’t miss the way his hands lingered there for a moment before Alucard’s voice floated into the room again, shouting about the urgency of moving before day broke in full. Razzle shrugged, moving to the door and picking up his fire axe on the way out.

After adjusting her pack for another moment, Isa turned to Zar, the full brunt of her smile now directed his way. “You coming, Zar?” she asked kindly, and he couldn’t stop himself from smiling. Sure, Razzle was an idiot, and he didn’t know what was going on with him, but as long as Isa kept smiling at him like that, he’d be over the moon.

“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered, jumping to his feet and grabbing a bit of ammo before heading to the door. “I’m coming.”

* * *

“It called the fuckin’ horde!” Razzle screamed over the sound of hundreds of infected rushing toward them with bloodthirsty screams and chilling whitened eyes. He hacked at them ruthlessly, but his axe could only do so much when the crowd around him was not thinning any. Alucard was frantically reloading his pistols, backing up as the hoard pushed them all closer to the edge of the mountainside. Why they thought taking the scenic route around the city would be any better than infiltrating it was now beyond Zar. Isa pumped round after messy round into the monsters, but still they kept coming. She was getting frantic, her motions smooth but losing accuracy. Accuracy wasn’t much of a deciding factor when it came to the shotgun, but nevertheless, it was disconcerting to see Isa spraying a body of people with bullets without much thought as to who she was pointing it at.

Zar found his automatic rather useful, simply using a side-to-side method of distributing his ammo into the rotting flesh running at him. He managed to keep a fan-shaped area in front of him completely secure, but he could tell that slowly, their group was moving toward the edge of the precipice behind them.

“Fucking Hunter!” Zar shouted, hating the damned thing for its howling scream as it lunged at somebody. He was still slightly bleeding from his chest, but that was the least of his concerns. The Hunter had attracted the attention of the giant-ass horde, and now he was unsure if they would be able to survive this one.

“Help me!”

Zar turned toward the sound of the cry, Razzle hanging off the edge of the cliff by his hands, his axe lost somewhere to the swarming horde. Isa turned and began fighting her way toward his voice and Zar, after a moment of deliberation, began doing the same. He looked over the crowd for any sign of Alucard, finally finding the whitened hair moving closer to Razzle as well – before disappearing entirely.

“Alucard?” he called over the sounds of wet growls and groans, shoving infected out of his way with all of his might. “Alucard?!”

“Down here,” came a feeble cry in return, and Razzle let out another shout as the sound of crumbling earth permeated the air. Isa still made her way to Razzle, Alucard too far away to help immediately.

“I’m slipping!” Razzle shouted frantically, and Isa strung her shotgun through her pack before reaching down and grasping at one of his arms, beginning to haul him up bodily. She grunted and groaned, heaving herself backwards to accommodate his weight, her eyes shut. After a moment of straining, she let him go, panting from the exertion. She looked at Zar, her eyes pleading.

Zar was moving as fast as he could, dodging all manner of the horde and shoving others off into the fall awaiting them all below. He finally reached them, leaning down and grasping Razzle’s other arm, and together, they began hauling him up the side of the cliff.

“Dig your feet into the side and push up!” Isa cried, still tugging on his arm. She sent out a wild kick backwards, striking an infected hard enough to knock a few back with its stumbling.

“I’m trying,” Razzle responded, his eyes closed as he curled his arm, attempting to haul himself up through their weight.

“Help! For God’s sake,” Alucard’s voice could be heard, but through the people, he couldn’t be seen. Isa looked off in his direction, her eyes wide and suddenly, dread finally caught up with her.

“Hold on, Alucard! Just a bit longer!” she cried, pulling harder on Razzle’s arm. His waist was just barely below the cliffside, but his weight was still pulling him down.

“I **_can’t_**! I can’t, for God’s sake, please…!” His desperate pleas were enough to make Isa drop Razzle entirely and pull out her shotgun, hammering the butt into one before turning it and blasting a path away from them. Zar continued to pull on Razzle’s arm, reaching out and grasping the other one.

“Isa!” he cried, but he still pulled on Razzle, and slowly, the man moved up the cliff face. Every once and a while he would lash out a leg, pushing back the infected that were still clamoring for a taste, but he began to grow tired, his body shaking from the exertion. Finally, Razzle was able to plant a palm on the ground and haul himself up entirely, looking around the horde. He grabbed a few lunging for him and threw them off the cliff, the brute force of his body enough to act as a plow through them, and they attempted to find Isa and Alucard.

“Alucard?! Isa?!” Zar cried, keeping the infected off Razzle’s back as he pushed through them, breaking off nondescript limbs and throwing bodies over the edge. “Hang on, we’re coming!” From afar, Zar could catch pieces of their voices floating through the air, but the thick horde kept them from rushing at their fastest.

“I can’t – We’re slipping!”

“Isa, let go!”

“Alucard, I’ve got you! I promise! I’m just – ”

“Zar, Razzle! …No, nonono - !”

“Augh, AAAAAUGH!!!”

At the sound of their distressed cries, Zar and Razzle sped up, but it was too late. The last they saw was Isa tumbling over the edge, still holding on to Alucard’s hand. Alucard’s face had been scratched, his neck damaged, his shirt ripped. The horde had attacked them, pushing them over, some of them leaping after to finish them off. The others turned to Zar and Razzle, who kept pressing on, despite the sudden drop of their guts and the tears clinging to their eyes. They broke through the horde with the last of their might and made a scramble for the woods, tearing through it as quickly as they could in their injured states.

In a moment that nearly made them want to die they reached the top of the steep hillside and discovered, not far beyond, lights. They sprinted to the safe house not three hundred feet from the corpses of their friends and bolted the door, sinking instantly to the floor.

Many walls were broken that night by angry fists, and if neither of them slept and just wept instead, they didn’t hold it against one another.

Besides, Isa had said it was never healthy to mourn alone.

* * *

“I never fucking liked you.”

Zar looked up from his bowl of truffle soup and eyed Razzle as if he had just flashed him a coat full of stolen watches. “Is there somewhere you are going with this or is it just a statement?”

“I’m going somewhere with this,” he replied, curled up tightly in his blanket and looking about owlishly. Zar nodded, looking back into the bottom of his bowl and fiddling idly with his spoon. Razzle, taking this as acceptance, continued speaking. “I never liked you because you were young and cocky. You were strong and you had a girl by your side, and I didn’t see why she was worth protecting. But you protected her alright. You would’ve bashed me to hell and back if I hadn’t shut up about her being useless. She proved her own with a shotgun, definitely. Her brain won Alucard over.” His expression developed a shadow, then, and he shook his head. “Not the point.” He adjusted himself, growing closer to the fire, enjoying its warmth. Zar simply sipped his soup and listened.

“So, I shut up about it and moved on. I didn’t let her irritate me anymore. But man, **_you_**? I could never find out what it was about you that pissed me off until one night you were loading your automatic and saying you’d take the first watch despite the fact that you’d taken it last the night before, and I realized what it was.” Zar looked up from his soup, looking at Razzle, but the bigger man was staring into the fire, his face blank, his gaze lost. “You had **_drive_**. You had something to keep you going, something worth fighting for, and it was enough to encourage you to take the hard road and do the right thing, even if it meant you lost 4 hours of sleep a night. And I wondered what the fuck you had that I didn’t, that could keep you going even while I was struggling; what the hell made you **_stronger_** than I was.”

He grunted, shifting himself once more, setting down his bowl of unfinished soup and curling tighter into his roughed-up old blanket. “Then, the day before they died” - Zar flinched, because Zar would always flinch when he thought about them – “when I was burned by that Spitter, I realized another thing. I realize what made you so strong, so willing to risk it all. Because Isa took out this bottle from her bag and started throwing this random stuff all over my arm, and by the time she was addressing her own burns, I realized it was aloe mixed with baking powder and water. She’d wasted half of her Spitter goo treatment on me.” He scoffed, shifting again, and Zar forgot about finishing his soup. He set it down, moving a little closer to Razzle, pulling his own blanket up and around his shoulders, still watching him. Razzle ignored his motion. “That’s when I knew that she was it, man. She gave me that kindness, wasting her antidote on me, waiting to heal herself so my burns wouldn’t take my arm out of commission. She was your reason to try and beat this thing, and she became mine a little, too. That’s why I packed up her stuff and watched her make another batch. She taught me about herself, and she taught me about you, too.” He finally looked at Zar again, a small smile breaking his features. “And now I don’t dislike you anymore.”

Zar smiled, looking into the flame himself, watching it dance. “For what it’s worth,” he murmured softly, “I don’t hate you anymore either.”

Razzle raised a brow. “Oh?” he asked. “And why is that?”

“Because of what you just said.” Razzle laughed in response. Zar scrunched his nose. “I didn’t really like Alucard too much, but he was a good man. A great leader.”

“Baahh,” Razzle spat, his expression turning annoyed. “He was like a nerdy little brother: annoying, demanding, and a know-it-all.” His expression softened then, and Zar watched it with fascination. “But he was a brother nevertheless.”

A moment of silence passed, and Zar suddenly became apologetic for insulting the dead. “I’m sorry.”

“Nah, don’t be.” Razzle turned to Zar and smiled, and his turmoil was slightly lifted. “He was never quite fond of either of us either. But I think he appreciated us.”

“Why, because we’re big?”

Despite his amused smile, Razzle’s response was sincere. “Because we stuck by him, even though he knew we thought he was an ass.”

Zar laughed, throwing his head back, and when he stopped, he simply stared at the stars. Time and space continued on even though Zar felt like life had stopped. A week in the safe house, not leaving or trying to carry on, kind of did that to him. He wondered when they’d leave, start anew, and try to find new survivors. He wondered if they ever would.

“Razzle?” His voice was feeble in the open air, but he didn’t hold it against himself. He knew his companion wouldn’t.

“Mmm?” the bigger man asked, still curled up before the fire.

“Do you think we’ll carry on?”

He laughed as if it was a stupid question. “Of course we will.”

“But our reasons are gone.”

Here, a hand clapped on his shoulder, and Zar turned to Razzle, shocked by the smile on his face, the picture of ease that he painted. “Well,” he said, his hand warm through the thick blanket, “we’ll just have to find some new ones.”

After a few moments of silence, Zar nodded slowly, and it was as if a weight had been lifted. Razzle nodded to him and then turned his back to the fire, sinking down onto the ground and curling into himself, closing his eyes. After a moment, Zar moved their bowls away from them and did the same, falling asleep to the warm comfort on his back.

Morning came, dawn rose, and the world sprang back into life. Razzle found a machete. Zar reloaded his automatics.

A week of mourning was all they were willing to take. And then they finally got out of there.

**Author's Note:**

> Come visit me on [tumblr!](http://exacteyewriting.tumblr.com)


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